Michael Louis Friendly (born 1945) is an American-Canadian psychologist, Professor of

Psychology Psychology is the scientific study of mind and behavior. Psychology includes the study of conscious and unconscious phenomena, including feelings and thoughts. It is an academic discipline of immense scope, crossing the boundaries between ...

York University York University (french: Université York), also known as YorkU or simply YU, is a public university, public research university in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. It is Canada's fourth-largest university, and it has approximately 55,700 students, 7,0 ...

in Ontario, Canada, and director of its Statistical Consulting Service, especially known for his contributions to graphical methods for categorical and multivariate data, and on the history of

data In the pursuit of knowledge, data (; ) is a collection of discrete Value_(semiotics), values that convey information, describing quantity, qualitative property, quality, fact, statistics, other basic units of meaning, or simply sequences of sy ...

and

information visualisation Data and information visualization (data viz or info viz) is an interdisciplinary field that deals with the graphic representation of data and information. It is a particularly efficient way of communicating when the data or information is nu ...

Biography

Born in

New York City New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the most densely populated major city in the Un ...

, Friendly obtained his BS in 1966 from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and his MS in 1969 from

Princeton University Princeton University is a private research university in Princeton, New Jersey. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and one of the ...

. In 1971/2 he also obtained his PhD in psychology at Princeton under supervision of Harold Gulliksen and Peter Ornstein, with the thesis titled "Proximity Analysis and the Structure of Organization in Free Recall." Friendly's first research project in the field of

psychometrics Psychometrics is a field of study within psychology concerned with the theory and technique of measurement. Psychometrics generally refers to specialized fields within psychology and education devoted to testing, measurement, assessment, and ...

and cognitive psychology had started at the

Educational Testing Service Educational Testing Service (ETS), founded in 1947, is the world's largest private nonprofit educational testing and assessment organization. It is headquartered in Lawrence Township, Mercer County, New Jersey, Lawrence Township, New Jersey, b ...

and

, and was made possible by a Psychometric Fellowship awarded by the Educational Testing Service. After graduation Friendly jointed the Department of Psychology at the

in Ontario, Canada, where he continued his research. At the York University he was appointed Associate Professor and later on Professor of Psychology, and since 1985 also director of its Statistical Consulting Service. Friendly is Associate Editor of the ''Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics'' and an Editor of ''Statistical Science.'' In 2018 he became a

Fellow of the American Statistical Association Like many other academic professional societies, the American Statistical Association (ASA) uses the title of Fellow of the American Statistical Association as its highest honorary grade of membership. The number of new fellows per year is limited ...

Work

Friendly's research interests have developed over years. It started in the 1970s with the application of quantitative and computer methods to problems in cognitive psychology, including the cognitive aspects of extracting information from graphical displays. In the 1990s Friendly started focussing on the history of statistics and data visualization, and furthermore graphical methods for data and information visualization.Profiles of Faculty Members in the History and Theory of Psychology Area
. Department of Psychology. York University. Retrieved 07 July 2008.

Publications

Books

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Support web site
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Selected articles and reports

* 1991. "Interpreting higher order interactions in loglinear analysis: A picture is worth 1000 words". With John Fox. Tech. rep., Institute for Social Research, York University, Toronto, CA. * 1992. "Graphical methods for categorical data". In: ''Proceedings of the SAS User's Group International Conference'', 17:1367-1373. * 1994
"A fourfold display for 2 by 2 by K tables"
Tech. Rep. 217, York University, Psychology Dept. * 1994. "Mosaic displays for multi-way contingency tables". In: ''Journal of the American Statistical Association'', 89:190-200. * 2000
"A brief history of the mosaic display."
''Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics''. 11(1):89-107. URL * 2000. "The roots and branches of statistical graphics". With Dan Denis. In: ''Journal de la Société Française de Statistique'', 141(4):51-60. (published in 2001). * 2001/2008
"Milestones in the history of thematic cartography, statistical graphics, and data visualization"
URL ''www.datavis.ca/milestones'' 32 (2001): 13. . * 2007. "A brief history of data visualization". In: C. Chen, Wolfgang Härdle and Antony Unwin, eds., ''Handbook of Computational Statistics: Data Visualization'', vol. III, chap. 1, pp. 1–34. Heidelberg: Springer-Verlag. * 2007.
Visualizing nature and society
. With

Gilles Palsky Gilles Palsky (born 1962), is a French geographer and Professor at the Pantheon-Sorbonne University in Paris, France from 2007 to 2015. He is a member of the editorial board of ''Cybergéo'' and ''Imago Mundi,'' and known for his work on the hist ...

. In: James R. Akerman and Robert W. Karrow, eds., ''Maps: Finding Our Place in the World'', pp. 205–251. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. * 2007
"HE plots for Multivariate General Linear Models."
''Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics'', 16, 421-444.

References

External links

Milestones in the History of Thematic Cartography, Statistical Graphics, and Data Visualization
An illustrated chronology of innovations by Michael Friendly and Daniel J. Denis.
The Past, Present and Future of Statistical Graphics
a 2004 presentation by Michael Friendly on VIEWS, London, Nov, 2004.
Carme 2011 - Advances in visualizing categorical data - Michael Friendly
a 2011 presentation by Michael Friendly at Carme 2011 {{DEFAULTSORT:Friendly, Michael 1945 births Living people American psychologists Information visualization experts Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute alumni Princeton University alumni York University faculty Fellows of the American Statistical Association